A new magnetic sensor with Mach-Zehnder/Sagnac optical fiber interferometer

This paper presents a new structure for magnetic sensor with Mach-Zehnder/Sagnac optical fiber interferometer. The magnetostrictive optical fiber sensor is placed in one of the two arms of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which can detect the optic phase shift by testing the length difference of the arm caused by environmental magnetic field. Because of forward and backward transmission in the arms, the Mach-Zehnder/Sagnac optical fiber interferometer can deduce twice exactly of the phase shift proportional to the length difference as Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Theoretically, description of the Mach-Zehnder/Sagnac interferometer is given, and some main issues in the magnetic field sensor with optical fiber interferometer are demonstrated with experiments. The magnetic sensors are implemented using the proposed methods. © 2009 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH.